The Great King (32 page)

In fact, my recovery dated from the first day we reached a post house on the Royal Road. The Royal Road runs from Susa to Sardis, and does not go south to Tarsus. So we spent two weeks riding north to catch it in central Lydia.

My fever broke – for good – in a small stone post house at what appeared to be the top of the world. I ate, and Hector pressed my hand, and Cyrus admitted that he had feared for my life. It was all very gratifying.

I also discovered that I had slowed them all down. Because after two days on the Royal Road, when I’d eaten a huge meal of mutton and then demanded a few gallops to cheer my restless horse, Cyrus announced we were going to move faster – and suddenly, despite our forty men and ten pack animals, we began to make real time, travelling as far as two hundred stades a day.

The second or third night on the Royal Road, I found that Aristides had put his bedroll next to mine. And Bulis moved Nikeas’s bedroll over two places, and he and Sparthius moved into my corner. Only important royal guests received the right to live in the post houses – which were like small inns. Most people slept outside them, and indeed there were rows of small shelters of varying degrees of craft built outside, and while some post houses were empty of visitors, others were packed with people and herds.

Indeed, the roads and the post houses were among the greatest wonders of the empire.

At any rate, when the satrap’s guardsmen settled down, Aristides rolled as close to me as a lover. ‘It is good to have you back,’ he said. ‘Have you looked in the store houses?’

I hadn’t even seen a store house.

‘They’re stuffed with grain,’ he said. ‘I looked in the grain barn here – it is also packed. There is enough grain in that barn to feed ten thousand men.’ He squeezed my shoulder. ‘I know what I’m saying – I’m a farmer.’

Bulis spoke out of the dark behind me. ‘He’s getting the road ready for his army,’ he said.

I chuckled. ‘Perhaps we could arrange for an army of rats,’ I suggested.

Bulis all but hissed. ‘That would not lead to the contest we desire,’ he said.

As we descended from the mountains into the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the preparations of the Persians and Medes became more obvious. At every town, men were conducting inspections. Every forge was busy making spears and armour. Horse herds were being moved into the autumn grazing, and the harvest was coming in, and there were government men everywhere, collecting, enforcing – the power of the Persian bureaucracy was staggering compared to anything I’d seen in Greece, and their taxation was the heaviest I could imagine on the Babylonians.

It was hot and sticky, and my hip still hurt. I had aches in my back that seemed to connect with my pelvis, and even regular massage – in this, at least, the Persians are our brothers – didn’t seem to fix the injury. Muscles had been damaged. My body was far more deeply hurt than I had thought.

The area between the rivers was the most intensely cultivated I had ever seen. It made Boieotia and Green Plataea appear a howling wilderness. Laced with canals and irrigation ditches, the fields rolled away in an endless embroidery of man’s handiwork on the face of the earth, and the canals and irrigation ditches were
old.
We passed the ruins of cities that our guides told us were more than two thousand years old – one they claimed was four thousand years old.

Cyrus rode by my side. It was the longest time we’d spent together since my youth, and he was eager to see his home and his father. And we were delighted to find that the friendship of youth had been built on stone, not sand. We fenced with sticks and wrestled and raced our horses and even shot bows, and we were well matched at all but the last, where he was utterly my master.

And I began to be serious about Hector’s training. With no less than three Spartans, we were quite the travelling school of martial prowess, and as the three Spartans seemed disposed to share their knowledge, Hector had two months of the finest instruction that a man could have on wrestling, boxing, grappling, the use of the sword and knife, the spear and the bow. Cyrus joined us every day, although public martial exercise was not a Persian notion, and men – and women – would emerge from their travel shelters, or in town would come out of their houses to watch us exercise.

In one town in Mesopotamia, Brasidas spent the evening hours in the most mosquito-infested place I’d ever been, teaching spear fighting to Babylonian youths. There was some wrestling, and when he finally joined us, he looked grave.

‘These men are very well trained,’ he said. ‘They are not Spartans, but they are not soft.’ He glanced at Bulis. ‘Who is it who says the Medes are soft?’

Bulis shook his head. ‘Only a fool,’ he agreed.

It was an hour before I realised that I had seen Brasidas and Bulis speak to each other.

But Cyrus, who shared my chamber, laughed. ‘These are not Persians or Medes,’ he said. ‘These are Babylonians. By our standards, they
are
soft.’

Because of my letters for Sallis, we detoured a little off the Royal Road to visit Babylon. Greeks have been coming to Babylon since the time of the poetess Sappho or before – her brother served there, as you all know. We’ve all heard of the hanging gardens and the temple of Marduk and we know that Greeks lie.

The men who had seen Babylon only lied by diminution.

First, it was the most populous city I have ever seen – even more so than Thebes in Aegypt. I cannot imagine how many men and women live in Babylon – slaves and free, they are uncountable. But the temple of Marduk towers over all, and the gardens are like a mountain covered in plants, as the designer intended, for the story is that they were built by a great king of Babylon for his wife, who missed her home in the mountains.

And the temple of Marduk? Or, to be specific, the
ziggurat
? It is a mountain made by men for the gods. Perhaps it is as tall as the acropolis of Athens. Perhaps it is not.

Neither one was the greatest marvel of this city.

And on the plains outside the gates was an army – a magnificent army of horsemen and chariots and armoured infantry. Cyrus told me that Babylon was on the edge of revolt – that despite being one of the core kingdoms of the Persian Empire, Babylon craved its independence.

We were breakfasting on the walls, drinking the very sweet date wine and eating little rolls of wheat flower with butter and honey. If Babylonians are a little soft, they should be forgiven. Truly, it is a land of plenty.

Cyrus was watching the army drill.

‘It was a mistake for the Great King to permit them to assemble,’ he grumbled.

Now, to be honest, I had almost never heard Cyrus criticise Xerxes. That’s merely good policy – I might rant against bad government in Plataea, to another Plataean, but I would not air my dirty laundry to a Spartan or a Persian.

Nonetheless, I had seen signs that Cyrus and his men did not love the current regime. For one thing, it was as plain as the nose on his face – and Cyrus had quite the nose – that he detested Hydarnes. Cyrus, far from resenting the Spartan heralds, seemed to enjoy Hydarnes’ discomfiture.

And there had been a day or so at Hydarnes’ court when it appeared that the satrap would be with us on the road, and Cyrus had writhed in annoyance.

But this was overt criticism.

I leaned out over the railing. We were guests in one of the Great King’s many palaces. Slaves bustled about, seeing to our needs with a level of obsequious fear that I found unpleasant.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘They seem like a mighty host.’

Cyrus shook his head. ‘Xerxes seeks always to please all men,’ he said. ‘He is not as sure of himself as a Great King must be. The Babylonians remain loyal to us only when they fear us. Babylon and Persia are
not friends.
If these men drill together, they will only convince each other that they must resist us.’ He met my eye.

I smiled. ‘Which would be the best thing for Greece, would it not?’ I asked. That famous Persian honesty could be used.

Cyrus was no fool. ‘Oh, revolt in Babylon would stop the invasion, at least for a time.’

In fact, what I saw out there on the plains of Mesopotamia was an army of almost fifty
thousand
men, most of whom were armoured. Almost a quarter of them were mounted. The charioteers outnumbered the entire phalanx of Plataea.

I watched them exercise, and Bulis joined me. We watched them all day.

Towards evening, they passed back into the city through the main gate to the cheers of a crowd so huge I couldn’t count them.

‘Do you want to fight them?’ I asked Bulis.

He smiled – the man who never changed expression.

‘Yes,’ he said.

The army of Babylon was incredible. Vast, well armoured, and beloved of their people. But that was not the most magnificent spectacle Babylon had to offer.

I was lying about in Babylon because the heat and the insects had put me back into my fevers, and I was sick for several days, and spent them watching the army drill. But on my fourth day in the largest city in the world, I rose, took Hector and a pair of local slaves, and went to the house of Sallis’s sister with his letters to her.

I have no notion of what Sallis said to his sister in those letters. But like saving Polypeithes’ chariot on the plains of Alpheos, it was one of the pivotal moments of the war. The world turns on the whims of the gods, and on the actions of men of whom no one will ever hear.

Sallis had impressed me as a gentleman, but he’d never mentioned wealth or power, and he seemed to me to be a senior servant, so I suppose that I had imagined his sister as a portly matron of forty, living with her husband the dye merchant in some narrow but attractive street. Indeed, when I gathered my little group to attend her, I worried that Hector and two slaves might appear too long a tail for her and might make me seem arrogant.

In fact, Sallis’s sister was the wife and widow of a man who might have been King of Babylon, and she lived in a palace larger than the one in which I was housed, hard by the great temple. It occupied the whole of a low hill, and had its own garden – this
inside
the walls of the most densely populated place in the world. Nor was the complex a single building or even three or four around a central yard. It was a dozen buildings – a hall, a small temple, a stables, a barracks for slaves, another for soldiers.

I stood and gaped like a hick. In fact, Babylon made me feel a bumpkin every minute.

I was rescued by my borrowed slaves, who ran – in the most intense heat I’d ever known – into the slave barracks and came back with directions to the ‘main’ palace. And a further escort. And then we were briefly interrogated by military retainers in fine armour – coats of bronze plates, some tinned to look like silver. They wore pointy helmets that made them look like exotic animals, and officers wore turbans of linen wound around the peaks.

No one spoke Persian but my borrowed slaves. So all conversations were three sided.

In the end, I met a supercilious major-domo who took my letters and dismissed me like a slave. I shrugged – I still, at that point, was not sure that Sallis’s sister wasn’t the wife of a senior servant. I really wasn’t any too sure what my slaves were telling me, and Hector was as confused as I, and we had a good laugh about it when we returned to the Great King’s palace.

Ah, what a fine question, thugater! Of course, the Great King almost never came to Babylon, and at that moment, Xerxes, King over Kings, was hunting lions in the valley below Susa, another thousand stades away. But his palace in Babylon was kept open for visitors and messengers and ambassadors.

At any rate, Hector and I lay on a couple of kline and mocked ourselves to Brasidas and Cyrus and Aristides, who were entertained. Aristides actually broke through his reserve and had to swing his feet to the floor as Hector described the Hero of Marathon, stammering to a bored Babylonian slave driver.

But that was not the end of the letters. Before the evening came and the oil lamps could be lit, the very same major-domo appeared, ushered in by the Master of the Palace, a Persian gentleman who’d greeted us on arrival and had scarcely been seen since.

Aristides was still there, helping Hector with his rhetoric.

The major-domo threw himself on the floor at my feet.

I laughed. Greeks always do, when foreigners do this thing. It’s comic. A man’s arse sticks up in the air – anyway, it is most certainly not Greek.

But the Persian fetched Cyrus, and we had a four-sided conversation, from which I eventually understood that the major-domo had mistaken me for an unimportant slave, and his mistress, upon reading the letters, had sent him with a sword that I could use to kill him if I so desired.

The Master of the Palace – yet another Darius, of course – told me that this was merely good manners, and assured me that I was welcome to kill the man.

‘Are you a slave?’ I asked the man.

He raised his head. ‘No, lord.’

‘He sounds like a slave to me,’ Aristides said.

I raised the man and took the sword. ‘Translate for me,’ I said to one of the Babylonian slaves. ‘In Greece, from where I come, one of the greatest sins a man can commit is to treat a free man like a slave. We call it hubris.’

The man closed his eyes and tensed his neck muscles.

‘But no one is allowed to execute a free man for hubris.’ I shrugged. ‘I forgive you. I am a foreigner and you had no idea who I was.’

It was a superb sword. It was made with that pattern welding that the chalcedonies do so well. The hilt was odd – not my style at all, with no cross-guard to protect the hand. I gave it to him.

‘Please keep the sword, master, as a gift from my lady. And I thank you for the gift of my life, and it would be my extreme pleasure to escort you to her. In fact,’ he said, suddenly quite cheerful, ‘in fact, unless you have another engagement, she insists.’

His change of demeanour was very much in keeping with everything and everyone I knew in Babylon. They were . . . mercurial.

I took a little trouble over clothes and cloak, although without trousers I looked like a freak to every man and woman on the streets – no one wants to wear an embroidered wool cloak on a hot summer night in Babylon. I wore the sword I’d been given.